Essays on Tabula Rasa

Ningbo’s newly completed Central Business District (CBD) belies its status as one of China’s oldest cities. The austere downtown landscape is the equivalent of architecture’s white-washed wall: a place of erasure, forgetting, and dubious progress. With the completion of Wang Shu’s Ningbo Museum in 2008, however, the Ningbo of the present is confronted by the forgotten landscape of its not too distant past. A craggy mountain of a building inspired by the region’s natural topographical features as well its unique crafts and architectural traditions, the Ningbo Museum is not simply an obligatory nod to ...

1. Descartes famously begins his Meditations on First Philosophy by considering so-called “radical doubt.” What is radical doubt, and what are the three phases in the argument that lead him to it? What does he believe is the idea that is fundamentally resistant even to the deepest of doubts? And why does Descartes begin his epistemology like this, anyway? Rene Descartes propounded his theory of radical doubt where he insisted on the systematic process of doubting one’s beliefs in a bid to determine or ascertain that which is indeed true. Descartes, in his radical doubt, advocated for doubting ...

Nature vs. Nurture controversy leads its history from ancient times, when some philosophers supported or denied the ideas of the essence of the human being. What is human made of, how we become who we are? Is it due to our nature or the environment where we live? It is no secret that humans are collective beings that needs socializing. In this process, every one of us gain skills that are important for us in future. And even our style of life influence on what we look like, how we dress, and how we behave. What we know we ...

Concerning personal identity my position is similar to that of John Locke. I reject the idea that my personal identity is tied to my soul, as Cartesian theory suggested. I also do not believe that my personal identity is tied to my body. It seems more plausible to me that my personal identity is tethered to my memories because I am a culmination of my experiences. What I have endured, learned, and observed have made me into the person typing this. Memories are what have created my personal identity. My position on the mind and body problem, or that ...

The old age debate on nature versus nurture is still enjoying heated debate in the field of psychology. The controversy is on where human beings acquire their traits, could it be the environment or the inborn characteristics? There are those who believe that the human behavior influenced by the “nature” while others believe that it is the “nurture” that dictates traits (Buss, 2012). Nature in this debate is the total of what human beings come to the world with, whereas nurture is the influence that the one gets after birth. The behavior of man is said to be because ...

Paul Heyer begins the work on the history of communication from the analysis of his understanding of the Enlightenment as a separate period and of its historical value. He points out that John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding can be chosen as an indicator to frame the period of Enlightenment. He continues the thought about the Age of Reason claiming that for the first time science and reason focused on the comprehensive examination of elements of human nature, society and history. Such point of view tended to differentiate itself from the theological and abstract metaphysical systems that took place ...

HOW PHILOSOPHY MIGHT SAVE US ALL

In the event that hostile aliens planned to eradicate life from the planet, the situation would begin to look grim immediately. There are few things that I could say as an astronaut to a more intelligent species that might persuade them to spare our lives, allowing us to continue living. I would have to assume they would want to kill us for one of two reasons: they want to harvest our planet for resources, or our actions have deemed us unworthy of life. Because I cannot use philosophy to argue against the harvesting of needed resources, I would choose to ...

Is the soul a blank slate ready to receive all knowledge or are we born with knowledge already written in our souls? In Latin, Tabula Rasa means a blank state; it’s an epistemological theory where people without in-built mental content and their knowledge will develop from both perception as well as experience. Steven Piker was among the top philosopher in the study of mind and he argued that the mind is not composed of any innate traits. This perspective is complicated as it refuses to acknowledge humanity and individual preferences. It replaces our opinions on certain matters and interferes ...

Though there is no way to track such things, one very widely asked philosophical question that rings throughout high school and college classrooms as well as bars and dinner time conversation is “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The question in itself is not complicated but its answer says much about the worldview of the respondent. Of course, no one argues that a person’s presence affects a falling tree—it emits the same sound waves whether or not there is someone to detect it. But it is a ...

Part 1

Learning Theories Learning, by dictionary definition, is the action of the verb “learns” which in turn means to acquire knowledge. It also means the action of acquiring instructions or, again, knowledge. The way people learn however, differ between persons. Some learn through words, others through experience, some do it by remembering and burning it into their memories, some by observing and some are born simply with the gift of quick understanding . How a person learns has been one field of education that has been changing since it came to the attention of the human race that learning is ...

It should be no surprise that the idea of utopia has often been explored by American writers, since one could argue that America itself exists as a sort of utopian ideal. The words of the Declaration of Independence posit a sort of utopia in their idealistic talk of ’life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ This is very bound up with the notion of America as a new world, a new place where fresh starts can be made and the mistakes of the past avoided: The utopian passages in Euro-American writings tended to elevate American spaces and colonists by comparing them to ...